The High Court today wanted to know what steps the Bangladesh Standards and Testing Institution (BSTI) has taken following two test reports on milk prepared by Dhaka University researchers. The BSTI has been asked to inform the High Court how much time it would need to develop its laboratory and parameters to detect antibiotics in milk.
The court ordered the BSTI lawyer Barrister Sarkar MR Hassan to talk to the BSTI authorities and provide the information before this court by 2:00pm today.
The HC bench of Justice Syed Rifaat Ahmed and Justice Md Iqbal Kabir Lytton passed the order while hearing a writ petition seeking necessary orders to test pasteurised milk.
The bench said it will pass necessary orders on the issue later in the day. Dhaka University researchers have tested milk twice since last month and found antibiotics in it. On June 25, DU’s Pharmacy Faculty and Biomedical Research Centre said they detected detergent and three types of antibiotics in packaged milk.
On the same day, the BSTI, the country’s lone quality control authority for food, submitted a report to the High Court, claiming it did not find anything harmful in the milk samples it examined. Then, the researchers have once again tested the milk and found antibiotics used for humans -- Oxytetracycline, Enrofloxacin, Ciprofloxacin and Levofloxacin -- in all of the 10 samples of pasteurised and non-pasteurised milk they tested.
Prof ABM Faroque, immediate past director of Biomedical Research Centre, unveiled the findings yesterday saying three of the samples contained all the four antibiotics while six had three. There were two antibiotics in one sample.